The Survivor season two schemer is back, and he wants none of your peanut butter
(CBS)

When Jeff Varner first laid eyes on Colby Donaldson on Barramundi Eve, all he could see was teeth — superhumanly straight, pearly white, cowboy hero teeth.

Those teeth would go on to enjoy a second-place finish worth $100,000, a brand new motorcycle, a cameo on Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, a don’t-blink-and-you-still-won’t-believe-it turn in Wes Craven’s Red Eye, a reality television hosting job on Top Shot, two return trips to Survivor — and, most impressively in Australia, an epic individual immunity run, unprecedented at that early point in Survivor history, unmatched until Season 10, tied by a few, surpassed by none.

Colby, talking through those perfect Texas teeth, would also call out eight words that would haunt Varner for the next fifteen years: “Come on over to the dark side, Jeff.”

Varner had been standing on top of a pole in the middle of the water for the past four hours, trying to alphabetize the 50 states, all in the name of his life in the game. If he surrendered, his odds of surviving the night would be slimmer than Mitchell Olsen. He would doom not only himself, but the four other Survivors he had lived with as Kucha over the last 21 days. The reasons to stay on that pole were many. The reasons to hop off were two: Exhaustion, and peanut butter.

Jeff Varner leapt off the pole and dove head first through door number two. The rest is ancient Survivor history.

These days, on the other side of the dark side, Varner knows the danger of peanut butter better than anyone else on the cast of Survivor: Cambodia – Second Chance, having willingly bowed out of his then final immunity challenge for a big bowl of the stuff. Years later, peanut butter and Survivor remain as close as ever, at least at Ponderosa — and it’s grossing Varner out, big time.

“It’s disgusting here,” he tells me when we speak in my cabana. “People here are slathering it on pancakes.”

In the real world, Varner says, he cannot stand the smell of peanut butter. He cannot stand the look of it. “I feed it to my dog every day and I kind of gag every time I give it to him,” and not a fake psyche-out-Tina-Wesson sort of gag. But Varner is not in the real world right now. He’s back on the beach, on the cusp of playing Survivor again after a 15-year layoff. Varner is aware that peanut butter might be on the menu at some point in the next 39 days. He’s heard that Survivors crave it out in the game. “I’m interested to see if I do.”

Over the next several minutes, Varner goes into extreme detail about his Survivor past, the people he’s up against in Second Chance, the schemes he’s cooking up, the deals he already has in place — but throughout the talk, he keeps coming back to one line: “This is my second chance.” These are not just words for Jeff Varner. They are his everything right now.

“It hit me hard yesterday,” he tells me. “I cried on the beach yesterday, and I don’t know why. Just the notion that I’ve waited all this time, and I’m not here because I want to be here, and I’m not here because Mark Burnett wants me here — I’m here because millions of people want me here. It just means so much more. It was an intense moment that just smacked me.”

Varner still has the troublemaker charm he boasted back in season two of Survivor, but he’s a different sight now. He’s bigger, for one.He speaks fast, but stops here and there to catch his breath. His voice booms in moments, and becomes a whisper in others. Here, he’s quiet, as he summarizes his mission statement: “I can’t jump off a pole for anything. I’m not just letting myself and my family down. I’m letting millions of people down.”

Returning to Survivor after15 years,with millions of people on his back, and a million dollars at stake, Varner knows that it’s go time. In fact, it’s been go time, for weeks now, well before he and the 19 other Second Chancers arrived in Cambodia, and well before they were finalized as the season’s official cast.

“It might be harder than it is out [on the beach],” Varner says when I ask him about navigating the pre-game process, sifting through interviews, fielding phone calls with the prospective contestants. “You don’t know who is going to get picked, you don’t know how you’ll be set up once you’re picked, and you don’t know what to do.”

Varner and the other Survivors are on lockdown right now, and are not able to speak to each other until the game begins. But he does not need to hear words in order to hear his opponents loud and clear.

“It’s all about body language,” he says. “I brought a body language book with me written by FBI experts about how they cracked cases. I’m reading about fingers, and hands, and toes, and legs, and arms, and I’m studying all these people while I’m reading it, and it’s [expletive] fascinating.”

Case in point: Spencer Bledsoe. The young lad from Survivor: Cagayan, and the youngest contestant on Second Chance, is the first person Varner mentions when I ask about who he’s observing.

“Spencer is textbook,” says Varner. “He is territory. He’s big, he’s long, he’ll stand with his arms and he walks like this.” Varner pantomimes Spencer’s stride for half a second, and then continues without skipping a beat. “He takes up a lot of space, which means, ‘I am the master. This is my game. This is my land. [Expletive] you all.’ He does a lot of crotch framing, which means he’s in charge.”

Varner stops for a quick breath. “Spencer thinks he has this game down pat,” he says. “I think Spencer could be the first one voted out of here.”

I ask him why he thinks that — is it because of how he perceives Spencer’s attitude? Varner smiles and shakes his head.

The song about the peanut butter and the pole is the first tune many people hum when thinking about Varner, but there are other songs to sing — like the time he made Tina puke, all the times he mocked Mike Skupin (“He’s an idiot!”), and how he started finger-wagging wars between his tribe mates without getting caught.

He was devious, clever, and very entertaining television — but the 49-year-old North Carolina native remembers a lot of other things from his Survivor past, and not all of them are good.

“I would say the wrong things to the wrong people,” he says, “Like saying to Rodger certain things that, now that I know Rodger, wouldn’t work. Walking away from that conversation thinking I shouldn’t have said that. Those little moments. Teeny tiny little things that you think about forever.”

Varner says he was just thinking about these little mistakes the other day, and how they’ve impacted his life in the 15 years since.

“I could’ve won a million dollars,” he says. “Every time I struggle paying a bill, I think about jumping off a pole for peanut butter. When I’m not able to buy the house I want, I think about jumping off the pole.”

But Varner does not feel that he’s stuck in the past. Indeed, he doesn’t seem to spend much time blaming his younger self for the mistakes made during his season.

“It was such a huge thing, Survivor 2,” he says. “To be picked and to go, it was all, ‘Look at me! Here I go! Lights! Stage!’ We didn’t know what we were doing.”

“This is very different,” he continues. “I’m much older. I’m much more mature. I’m much more observant. I’ve had 15 years to think about the mistakes I made. I feel like I’m ready.”

Varner’s observations extend to everyone in the Second Chance cast, but for now, he focuses on Spencer — and not just Spencer, but the three people from his season who are in Cambodia as well.

“There is a Cagayan four here,” he says, when I ask why he’s targeting Spencer. “Every show has a certain amount of people. From our perspective here, that’s really the only way to look at it. I sit there and I see Spencer, who is very strong. I see Tasha, who is very strong. I see Woo, who is very strong. I see Kass, who is mean as hell. They’re sitting right there together, and that’s danger. That’s a tool that I can use when I walk in the door. That’s where I’m aiming.”

Varner does not believe he’s alone with his Cagayan concerns (“I can sense that people are wary”), and Spencer isn’t the only Season 28 alum whose body language is pinging on the radar, either.

“We have one sofa on our porch,” he describes of the Ponderosa setup. “One big chair, right under the fan. Tasha parks [herself] there in the morning and does not move until night. It’s hers. She hogs it.”

Varner is looking well beyond the Cagayan foursome, too. “There are also people out here who are pairs,” he says, “and there are people out here who are singles — and those are the assets.”

At first, Varner says, he thought that he should be targeting the players without anyone else returning from their season — people like Stephen Fishbach, who has spent every year since he played Survivor writing about the show for People.com and dissecting strategy on the Survivor Know-It-Alls podcast.

“He’s a brainy little know-it-all, and even goes by that name,” says Varner. “He gives out Fishy awards and whatever the [expletive] that [expletive] is. I don’t even know what that’s about.”

Just as Andrew Savage told me he was cautious of Fishbach, Varner acknowledges the same, but he sees upside. “He’s dangerous, but he’s also by himself.” Varner feels the same way about Peih-Gee Law, the only contestant returning from Survivor: China. “She’s so awkward, watching her matriculate through people,” he says — but any perceived awkwardness aside, Varner views Peih-Gee as an asset.

“I’m looking at the singles,” he says — and then that Varner grin appears again. “And I have my people.”

Two days from now, when I visit Ta Keo beach, Jeff Varner is only around for a minute or two before he’s whisked away for a confessional — but even in his absence, his fingerprints are everywhere.

Before then, we’re still in my Cambodian cabana. The heat is alive and well in the room, despite the fan doing its best to keep things cool. “I’m so paranoid people are listening,” the sweat-slicked Varner says, fanning himself off. “The walls have ears here.”

Varner’s voice becomes a hushed whisper. He’s worried that other players might overhear what he says next — and it’s easy to see why, given the amount of information he volunteers.

Leaning in, Varner tells me he already has “a very solid alliance” in place with original Survivor runner-up Kelly Wiglesworth, the only contestant on the season with a longer layoff than Varner, and Terry Deitz, the Survivor: Panama third-place finisher who dominated the physical game with a Colby Donaldson record-matching five immunity wins in a row.

Varner adds another wrinkle to the plot, saying there was another person in his pre-game alliance: Shane Powers, Terry’s former cast mate, best remembered for quitting a longtime cigarette habit on the same day his first season began. Shane did not make the cut for Second Chance, to the surprise of many fans, and to the horror of Varner.

“That sucks,” he says about Shane not being here. “We had a conference call the night before we all left for LA. We talked about, ‘From this moment on, we don’t speak to each other. We don’t do anything. Here’s our early kill list. If we get separated, here’s who we lean toward.'”

Already, this pre-game alliance has lost one member, but one of Shane’s plans might still be in motion. “Shane had already worked up bringing Vytas in,” says Varner, referring to Vytas Baskauskas, veteran of Survivor: Blood vs Water, and brother of Aras Baskauskas, the winner of Shane and Terry’s original season. “Vytas is part of it, but he doesn’t know. He just knows to get on the beach and come to me and Kelly.”

“It’s all super secret and on the DL,” he says. “Watching them walk past me like they don’t even know who I am? It’s fun.”

Varner feels very good about having a solid four of himself, Kelly, Terry and Vytas. But he feels like he has other options, too — starting with a connection through Vytas, in fact.

“Vytas is connected to Ciera,” he says, “who ironically took care of me yesterday when I was having a little panic attack, which I loved.”From Ciera, Varner makes the leap to Monica Padilla. “Monica was on the same season as Ciera’s mother, Laura, so surely Laura called Monica and said, ‘Take care of my baby.’ I see those three as one, even though Monica is on her own. Monica is all over me — visually, facial, everything. I feel like I can go to Monica.”

Varner says he has yet another top-secret partner: Kelley Wentworth, one of the three players returning from Survivor: San Juan del Sur. “I’m aligned with Wentworth, and nobody in my other group knows about it,” he whispers. “She and I are going to try and be secretive and get as far into this as we can.”

Got all that? No? The short version is, Varner has his fingers in a lot of proverbial peanut butter jars. It’s sticky, it’s risky, but it’s exactly how he feels he needs to play.

“I don’t have a choice,” he says. “These guys are fit. These are decathletes. Every single one of them. Zero percent body weight.”

Varner is concerned about his physicality — more on that in a minute — but he feels great about his social connections, and I can understand why. When I visit Ta Keo, Terry, Vytas and Wiglesworth are all present, Varner’s secret ally Wentworth and secret nemesis Spencer are working on a fire pit, and potential asset Peih-Gee is off finding palm fronds with Shirin Oskooi. Looking past Ta Keo, there’s Bayon, with Ciera, Monica, and Fishbach — all of them players that Varner has a mind to utilize.

The options, much like the truth, are out there.

Even if his plans fall through, Varner still feels good about his ability to blend into the background, because his season was on so long ago, and he might not be as fresh in people’s minds as some of the more recent players.

“They remember me, but they don’t,” he says. “I got voted out so early. I feel like it’s an asset, to have it be so long ago for me. Like, you know Kimmi more than you know me, I think. You know Kimmi is the annoying one who got in the big fight. I don’t have any of those moments, which is great. I think I’m set up well.”

Varner brings up the K-word, and surprisingly, it’s not a dirty one. Not the way he sees it, at least. While Varner has options everywhere on Ta Keo, his secret weapon is somewhere else in Koh Rong, singing her children to sleep every morning on another beach.

Jeff Varner was not surprised when he was voted out of Survivor: The Australian Outback. The story goes that Kimmi Kappenberg, the fifth person tossed out of the season and the second one ousted from Kucha, told members of the opposite tribe before a challenge that Varner received a vote during their first Tribal Council.

Hours after the peanut butter and the pole, the five former Kucha and five former Ogakor went straight to Tribal and voted right down tribal lines, resulting in a deadlocked tie. Back then, Survivor resolved these situations by kicking out whoever received the most votes in the past — and Varner’s “one that I know of” trumped Donaldson’s zero.

“Because of a very large mouth of a former tribe member at Kucha, Ogakor knew I had that vote, and I knew there was nothing I could do about it,” Varner said in his final words. Kimmi’s slip of the tongue very likely cost Varner his shot at the million dollars, and solidified the fate of the other Kucha tribe members, as well.

The mechanism for breaking unbreakable votes has evolved since his first time playing Survivor, but Varner’s feelings on the issue remain raw.

“I’m not going to draw a rock,” he says defiantly and definitively. “There will be no chance. I will make my own choices and my own decisions. I will not draw a rock. If I have to flip a vote, I’ll do it. I can’t imagine going home because I drew a rock. How stupid would that be? This is my second chance. I’m not doing that. “

He is much softer on the topic of Kimmi. Varner admits that he was stunned to see her in the running for Second Chance, especially when he saw her with his own two eyes during the casting process — but he got over his shock, and decided that Kimmi’s presence is actually great for his game. “People think we hate each other. What a perfect little thing!”

Varner tells me that he wants to help Kimmi get as far in Second Chance as he can. “If she doesn’t screw herself, first,” he’s quick to add. “I told her on the phone before we came over here, ‘Kimmi, you have to shut up. If I walk by you and thump you in the back, that means shut up!'”

He doesn’t know how much the phone call helped. Varner tells me two stories about Kimmi in Cambodia, only one of which is fit for print: “We’re sitting here [at Ponderosa], and she’s wearing a T-shirt that says, ‘sick [expletive].’ She’s reading a book on Bill O’Reilly. She’s laughing, she’s snorting, everyone starts laughing … I can see facial reactions when Kimmi snorts. She snorts 15 times per day.”

I don’t believe Varner is imagining these facial reactions, either, since other Survivors will tell me later about Kimmi, her Bill O’Reilly book and her physicality; she’s certainly on the radar, and Varner does not know how much he can help her out. “I don’t know that I can get her to the end, but I want to sit next to her in the end.”The big reason, he says, is he can beat her — but there’s another reason, too.

“She’s had a very rough life,” says Varner. “Her marriage fell apart. She’s had financial trouble. She has a kid with kidney disease. She’s a 40-something waitress. She’s struggling. I want her to get as far and make as much money as she can.”

Later in the day, when I speak with Kimmi, and hear her talk about her family, I can see why Varner wants to help her out. Her love for her children is palpable and powerful. But Kimmi is just one representative of an interesting dilemma facing Varner; for all his talk about making alliances and playing smart, for all of his huge personality and snarky takedowns, he is visibly connecting with Second Chance on a deep, emotional level.

“There’s a lot at stake,” he says, opening up about how his mother is fighting breast cancer (as of this writing, Varner’s mother is cancer-free), and how he has an illness of his own: Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, a lung disease he developed after 30 years of smoking.

“It’s the reason why my voice is raspy,” he says. “This weather… as soon as I landed, I locked up. I’ve had panic attacks since I’ve been here.”

Varner says he’s working with the Survivor medical team on acclimating to the conditions in Cambodia, but he knows he has an uphill battle — and uphill anything is not exactly in his wheelhouse right now.

“I’m not going to be able to run up five flights of steps,” he says. “My mother is very important, and while I have that as a motivation, I also have this obstacle that I have to get through that nobody knows about.”

Going into the game, Varner feels he is “going to be the weak one,” and he’s trying to figure out how to turn that into “an asset as opposed to a liability. That’s what I lay in my tent thinking about at night.”

It’s why he’s trying to find “the good souls,” he says, “the people who can trust that I’m in their corner and will be in their boat, and people who won’t vote me out, and will talk the people who want to vote me out out of wanting to vote me out. That’s why I’m looking for the Vytases, and the people who are sweet, kind, and good-hearted.”

I ask Varner if he thinks his emotional attachment is a strength or a weakness. He’s not sure.

“It’s a great question,” he says. “I didn’t realize I was emotionally attached to this until yesterday. I’ve been emotionally detached. I thought I had missed my chance to come back again.”

He didn’t miss it. He’s back, he’s ready to play, and he’s here to win, even if there’s peanut butter at Ponderosa, even if he’s emotional, and even as he wants to help the Kimmi Kappenbergs of the world. When I ask him about “the good souls,” and whether or not he has it in him to cut them down when the time comes, Jeff Varner straight up laughs in my face.

“Absolutely,” he cackles. “I’m still the same mother [expletive] I was 15 years ago!”

Josh Wigler is a writer, editor and podcaster who has been published by MTV News, New York Magazine, Comic Book Resources, Digital Trends and more. He is the co-author of The Evolution of Strategy: 30 Seasons of Survivor, an audiobook chronicling the reality TV show’s transformation, and one of the hosts of Post Show Recaps, a podcast about film and television. Follow Josh on Twitter @roundhoward.

Visit Parade.com every week day until the September 23 premiere of Survivor: Cambodia – Second Chance for new stories from Josh’s trip to the set.